The inventive concepts disclosed herein relate to systems and methods for providing weather hazard and other hazard information to aircraft in flight for direct graphical integration into situational awareness and other display components in the cockpit by transmitting the data over a comparatively low bandwidth information and/or data exchange connection with the aircraft, the graphically displayed hazard information providing sufficient detail to support tactical decision making on the part of the pilots or aircrew.
Modern commercial and business-type passenger and cargo aircraft are equipped with increasingly sophisticated avionics suites. Increasingly, data communications between the aircraft and the ground are used to facilitate information exchange with various nodes for administrative flight following, aircraft system monitoring, and alert and warning information which may be of use to the pilots or aircrew in the aircraft, or to the entities exercising administrative or operational control over the aircraft on the ground.
In modern aircraft cockpits, received data is often translated for graphical display on one or more graphical display components as cockpit design is increasingly dedicated to the use of such interactive displays for information display, and many aircraft control and monitoring functions. An objective is to provide the aircrew with easy-to-interpret information at a glance upon which they can make decisions regarding safe and efficient operation of the aircraft while airborne, and modify operations in response to certain unexpected conditions.
In the more than a decade since the introduction of the above-described graphical display components into the more modern “glass” cockpits of aircraft, and despite the increasing levels of sophistication in the data exchange and display components themselves, shortfalls still exist in a capacity to provide available information to a particular aircraft, and to translate that information for graphical display in the cockpit with a high enough quality, and in a consistent enough manner, to be usable to the aircrew. Among the reasons why such shortfalls exist is the necessity to “simplify” the information in order to accommodate, for example, bandwidth restrictions associated with providing the information to the aircraft.
A particular area in which the shortfalls are recognized is in the limited capacity for most current avionics systems and/or suites to provide access to weather threats via high-quality, easily-interpreted graphical display. Many modern aircraft include forward-looking radars for particularly detecting potential conflicting traffic. Such radars are also generally capable of detecting certain areas of inclement weather, and/or precipitation, particularly dense precipitation, directly in front of the aircraft. The radars have very limited, if any, capability to sense and display certain hazardous conditions, including pockets of turbulence, and/or to collect and display information regarding convective activity along the projected aircraft route of flight. In this regard, modern onboard avionics systems provide limited information regarding an area immediately in front of the aircraft, allowing the aircrew to make only short-term, last minute decisions regarding avoidance.
Current systems are generally incapable of displaying, in a usable manner, detailed graphical information available from ground sources regarding weather phenomena further along an expected route of flight. The requisite information exists by which to provide the aircrew situational awareness display information on one or more of the graphical display components in the cockpit for ease of interpretation. Current aircraft onboard installations, however, are generally incapable of receiving and displaying the available information in other than textual form, which must be further interpreted by the aircrew, except as comparatively low resolution images that may be available only for limited and/or predefined geographic areas.
These shortfalls are substantially based on limitations of the network and/or data exchange capabilities available with the avionics suites on board the aircraft, including via the Aircraft Communication and Reporting System (ACARS). ACARS in its many variations supports certain capacity by which to provide data inputs to the aircraft. On the message side, each individual ACARS data message is limited to 3,500 characters. This limitation makes it comparatively difficult to provide graphics information to the aircraft.
Differing techniques have been attempted to modify the graphics information for transmission via an ACARS data stream including attempts to represent binary graphical display information as text characters. Application of these differing techniques has, to date, yielded less than sufficient results in rendering graphical representations on the display components in the aircraft cockpit.
An additional recognized difficulty is that, once a particular configuration of equipment for data exchange and display is provided to achieve even limited success with graphical representation, the particular capability is often considered to be “built into the box.” Put another way, a factor complicating the advancement of generic capabilities for graphical data integration and display in the cockpits of aircraft is the reality that the avionics components themselves tend to be limited to the individual production capabilities as they existed at the time of design and/or manufacture of the avionics components. There is generally no capacity to easily take advantage of newer and advancing weather reporting capacity and/or data compression technologies as they may become available, because the boxes are simply not designed to be adaptable. If a new weather product (or even a new technology to compress and/or display the information) becomes available, particular aircraft with dated communications and display components are likely incapable of incorporating the additional capabilities for use.
Attempts have been made at “sectoring” the data for graphical display by specifying pre-defined discrete areas of coverage. When an “end of map” (or “end of area”) boundary is reached, however, up to four representations may need to be overlaid as the aircraft transitions through a corner of the represented area. Separately, differing mechanisms for image data reduction have been tried that are directed at (1) reducing the image scale (e.g., reducing the number of displayable colors or variations in displayable colors) and/or (2) reducing the image complexity (e.g., increasing a display area covered by each pixel to reduce an overall number of number of pixels to be received, interpreted and displayed). The applied reductions often result in severe limitation to the usefulness of the information and/or the usefulness of the resultant image.
The above-described shortfalls particularly adversely affect an ability to emulate radar representations on an ACARS display, but the shortfalls also affect other emulations and/or representations that have been attempted. While compression does help, the nature of weather products, such as radar, tend to increase in image complexity as weather activity deteriorates, leading to a reduction in the compressibility of the image, yielding an increase in the data size associated with the data when it is needed most. As a result, even as weather activity deteriorates, generating more data, thereby necessitating higher rather than lower fidelity, the increasing size of the required image data stream must be further adversely altered, usually by increasing the individual pixel size even over that which might be prescribed above regarding set levels of image data compression, resulting in even less information being made available to the aircrew when it is needed most.
Even for aircraft that support comparatively larger image data files, the larger data file sizes sent up to the aircraft for display in the cockpit takes several minutes (to tens of minutes) to deliver for display, and at significant cost. Additionally, increases in the complexity necessary to provide and present larger images tend to lead to higher failure rates in successful delivery to the aircraft for display.
Frustrated aircrew increasingly rely on their mobile personal electronic devices (PEDs) to provide higher quality data using high-speed satellite or ground based networks (when available) for the display of (weather) hazard information. Because these devices are not tied directly into the cockpit avionics, the aircrew must either hand enter the route to overlay, or attempt to visualize the route when viewing the weather products. Use of such devices for this purpose is generally unsanctioned and/or unapproved.
Even as new technologies are emerging to provide higher data throughput, these technologies are still considered years off in their particular implementations in addressing the difficulties presented in graphical display representation in ACARS or ACARS-like schemes in aircraft. Further, as with other newly-introduced capabilities, not only does a capability need to be demonstrated, but then certification of that capability needs to be undertaken for clearance for use on an aircraft flight deck.